


The Mentor

by chavalah



Series: The District 12 Team [2]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3466253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chavalah/pseuds/chavalah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adult members of the team reflect on Katniss and Peeta at specific points during "Catching Fire."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mentor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jae/gifts).



> Set after the announcement of the Quarter Quell

Sometimes he could curse those kids for coming into his life. Without them, he’d probably be spending his time right now staring down the bottom of a bottle, or slumped over it. Instead, he is secretly planning the revolution with a handful of victors, with Plutarch Heavensbee of all people, and with their shadowy contacts over at District 13. With all of the secrecy around those fine folks, they might actually still be ghosts.

He unscrews a bottle on the mental strain alone of the fact that he almost doesn’t want the revolution to happen. When else does his life actually make sense other than when he’s kicking it back with Chaff once a year? He’s long since lost a sense of common experience with his former neighbors, even as he slinks into the Hob every now and then for an elixir that the Capitol just hasn’t been able to brew up and send to him yet. In either case, subjugation under the Capitol, under poverty and under the Games is just a fact of life here. None of this would have been possible without Katniss anyway, and maybe that, more than anything, is why he’s doing this. He could sit back with a gin and flip off the whole world—a necessity, sometimes, in fact—but after both his tributes survived their Games, he couldn’t just leave them to rot. Gddamn mentor. He took a swig.

It’s been difficult keeping this a secret from them, though. Their relationship to this point was built on blunt honesty—even when it came to the less than likelihood of their individual survival of the first Games. Logically, he knows the reason for keeping them in the dark, but fuck logic, really—that’s not the game they played, not in the first Games, not on the Victory Tour; they were a team. Now the boy came to him begging to save the girl’s life and the girl came to him begging to save the boy’s life, and he promised them both, but secretly his allegiance is to the damn rebellion.

He takes another swig. By all the gin in his possession, he hopes they’ll one day forgive him, once all of them are safe in the invisible caverns of District 13 with enough firepower to take down the Capitol and dismantle the Games once and for all. And then, surely, they’ll all live in President Snow’s mansion where they’ll prance around in Effie’s feather boas. He eyes his half empty bottle. Better try to finish all of it before Peeta comes over with another exercise regimen.


End file.
